Sunday, 29 November 2009

Medication Time on Ward 4

It’s 10 O’clock. It’s medication time.Not quite a bacchanalian feast of chemicals;But they do iron out the larger quirksAnd stimulate the dead-zones of the brain.

Out of the walls, like ghosts, come the patients.They enter and travel the long silences.Float on each dark space.The clinical walls are deaf to the persons they contain.

The patients sit with their eyes fixed on nothing.They wait for the sun to shine on tomorrow.There is one patient with God’s best bum-deal.She’s hid here in her little corner of the wide world;Where her pain is kept safe away.Her eyes are nailed to the germ-free floorAs she slowly drags herself along the corridor…

Suddenly, she is mad at the world…Quick! One for the seclusion room!Hold her down tight.Inject her arms.Fill her with chemicals.They’ll send her to a short-stay death.Her mind will be closed down.

Soon after, she is rocking in the padded room.I don’t know her story.Why she cries.Why she screams.Why she bags the door all night.And I shall never ask her.

1 comment:

Been doing a bit of tracking, since your (?) kind comments on my PP page, and since there are never any actual "Contact" addresses at either the Forum or the Extra - and to my surprise, found this one. Having read these, if I may offer the following thoughts...I hope that the darkness which seeps up through the flooboards and in the window chinks on this page, has passed by now; much of my own poetry and other writing can slide into a dark abyss of bleak depression if I am having a bout of that nasty blackness, but eventually it seems to lift.Also - there seems to be an echo, or perhaps a faint shadow, of Kerouac here, in the occasional mixture of sorrow, angst, and yet detached observation of one recording and documenting his race's idiosyncrasies as they degenerate into globally self destructive psychoses.Altogether - dark, but powerful. Well done